Melvin Lasky

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Melvin Jonah Lasky (born January 15, 1920 in New York , † May 19, 2004 in Berlin ) was an American publicist of the anti- Stalinist left. He was best known in Germany as the editor of the anti-communist magazine Der Monats .

Life

Lasky grew up as the son of the immigrant Polish Jews Samuel Lasky and Esther Kantrowitz in the Bronx and attended the City College of New York . Here he formed a Trotskyist Jewish disputant group with Irving Kristol , Seymour Martin Lipset , Irving Howe and Daniel Bell , which distinguished itself from the numerically superior Stalinists of the college.

After growing up in New York, Lasky studied history at the University of Michigan . He then was the features editor of The New Leader . As such, he accused the Roosevelt government of moral emptiness for doing nothing against the Nazi genocide against Jews. Lasky was a member of the New York Intellectuals .

During the Second World War , Lasky served as a military historian in France and Germany from 1944 to 1946 . His notes from this period were published in German in 2014. After the end of the war, he remained in Berlin as a cultural officer at the US command of the American sector . There he later worked as a correspondent for American magazines (including The National Interest ).

At the first German writers 'congress in Berlin (1947), Lasky expressed "doubts about the Soviets ' understanding of democracy " and asked about the fate of interned Soviet writers, which caused a sensation. A year later, he and Hellmut Jaesrich founded the political and cultural magazine The Month in Berlin during the Berlin blockade , initially financed by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and one of the most important magazines of the post-war period in West Germany. Most recently it was published once a year.

In 1950 Lasky caused a stir again. During an appearance at the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the Titania Palace in Berlin, he called for “free elections and the realization of human rights in Eastern Europe”. He received support for this from cultural workers and intellectuals such as the philosophers Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers and the writers Albert Camus , Golo Mann and George Orwell .

From 1953 to 1990 Lasky was with Irving Kristol editor of the British culture magazine Encounter in London , where he also moved in 1958.

Both the Encounter and The Month were co-funded by the CIA , as the New York Times revealed in 1967. Some writers then distanced themselves from these publications.

Melvin Lasky was often a welcome guest in Werner Höfer's international morning pint . He ran a kind of literary salon at home with guests such as Alfred Jules Ayer , Isaiah Berlin , Arthur Koestler and George Mikes .

Grave of Melvin Lasky in the Heerstrasse cemetery in Berlin-Westend

Melvin Lasky was buried in Berlin, where he last lived again, in the state-owned cemetery in Heerstraße in the Westend district (grave location: 16-F-32/33). Willi Winkler described the grave monument as follows: "His tomb [...] is like a desk full of books."

family

Lasky was married to Brigitte Newiger from 1947 to 1974, with whom he had the children Oliver and Vivienne Freeman-Lasky. Since the mid-1960s, he had been in a relationship with the writer Helga Hegewisch , who had worked with him at the monthly publishing house. His sister Floria V. Lasky Altman (1923-2007) was a lawyer in the theater business who represented numerous prominent clients such as Jerome Robbins , Tennessee Williams and Gypsy Rose Lee .

Awards

Fonts (selection)

  • Request to speak about a revolution. The collapse of communist rule in East Germany . Translated by Peter Paul and the author. Ullstein, Berlin and Frankfurt am Main 1991. ISBN 3-548-34795-9 .
  • And everything was quiet. German diary 1945 . Translated by Christa Krüger and Henning Thies. Edited and with an afterword by Wolfgang Schuller . Rowohlt Berlin, Berlin 2014. ISBN 978-3-87134-708-5 .

Secondary literature

  • Marko Martin : Orwell, Koestler and all the others. Melvin J. Lasky and "The Month" . Mut Verlag, Asendorf 1999, ISBN 3-89182-073-9 .
  • Marko Martin: Dissident thinking. Travel to the witnesses of an age. The Other Library, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-8477-0415-7 .

Web links

Commons : Melvin J. Lasky  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Rafael Medoff: Letters They Wouldn't Publish. The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, January 23, 2006, archived from the original on March 20, 2012 ; Retrieved on March 15, 2009 (English, letter to the editor to the New York Times, in which in particular reference is made to an article "The Shame of a World" by Lasky in the New York Leader of October 23, 1943, in which he describes the reaction of the Allies on the Nazi genocide criticized as "sympathetic mumbo-jumbo and do-nothingism".).
  2. ↑ Melvin J. Lasky: And everything was quiet - German diary 1945 . Rowohlt, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-87134-708-5 .
  3. ^ Cold Warrior editor of the controversially funded 'Encounter'. In: The Independent . May 21, 2004.
  4. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende : Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 . P. 490.
  5. ↑ Willi Winkler : Where was your pride? The “German Diary 1945” by American journalist Melvin Lasky is the testimony of a non-warlike winner . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of February 19, 2015, p. 12.
  6. ↑ Melvin J. Lasky. In: Notable Names Database (NNDB) . Retrieved January 10, 2020 .
personal data
SURNAME Lasky, Melvin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lasky, Melvin Jonah (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American publicist of the anti-Stalinist left
DATE OF BIRTH January 15, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH new York
DATE OF DEATH May 19, 2004
Place of death Berlin